What is Social Media Marketing?
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Social media marketing is used build your online presence and promote your products and services.
Build personal and professional to networks to exchange ideas and information by sharing photos and videos, posting news, message boards, and postings on social networking sites to reach large and specific audiences.
Why is social media marketing so important to your business?
Improve brand awareness.
Create active communities.
Display items and services for sale.
Brand evaluation and customer service.
Promote products and services to specific audiences.
Monitor results and adjust marketing techniques as needed.
Five Reasons Small Businesses Should Use Social Media to Market Their Businesses
- You can reach a large number of people more spontaneously without paying large advertising fees.
- The use of blogs, social media, and business networking sites can increase traffic to your website from other social media websites. This in turn may increase your Page Rank, resulting in increasing traffic from leading search engines.
- Social media complements other marketing strategies such as a paid advertising campaign.
- You can build credibility by participating in relevant forums and responding to questions.
- Social Media sites have information such as user profile data, which can be used to target a specific set of users for advertising.
Given these key benefits, it appears that there are few downsides to social media marketing. However, in addition to the caution highlighted earlier regarding web security, one of the key limitations of this type of marketing technique is that it takes time to participate on social media sites.
How to Use Social Media Techniques to Your Advantage?
According to Watson et al. (professor in the scientific articles) with the popularity of digital marketing on the rise, many businesses are investigating how social media can help them promote their products and services to potential and existing customers.
Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter have transformed the way some businesses think about advertising. Some businesses direct customers toward their social network pages more than they direct them to their websites.
There are certain advantages to the market via social media, but there are related drawbacks as well. The primary advantages of social media marketing are reducing costs and enhancing reach. The cost of a social media platform is typically lower than other marketing platforms such as face-to-face salespeople middlemen or distributors.
Also, social media marketing allows firms to reach customers that may not be accessible due to the temporal and locational limitations of existing distribution channels. Social media platforms increase reach and reduce costs by providing three areas of advantage for customers. First, the marketing firm can provide unlimited information to customers without human intervention. This is an advantage over other forms of contact because the amount of information that can be provided is much greater than in any other form of communication. Additionally, and more importantly, the information can be provided in a form that customers can easily process and understand.
For example, airline scheduling and reservation systems are very difficult to create and maintain to serve individual needs. Additionally, in this context, the choices are large and difficult to provide in any format that is better than a web-based format.
Second, social media marketing firms can create interactions by customizing information for individual customers that allow customers to design products and services that meet their specific requirements For example, online checking and seat assignment can be done on the Internet.
Finally, social media platforms can allow transactions between customers and firms that would typically require human contact as in the case of successful firms such as Dell and amazon.com.
To understand better the advantages of social media marketing.
Are You Ready to Use Social Media Marketing Techniques?
If you have answered “yes” to all these questions and have determined that social media marketing techniques are suited to your business needs then you should begin to learn more about these techniques and how they can be.
- Start with Small Steps and Build on Your Success. You can get a feel for how social media sites work by commenting on other blogs or setting up your blog.
- Used to your advantage Consider video and photo sharing. If you are handy with a video camera you may want to consider “how-to” videos or tours of your business. These videos can be shared on appropriate social media websites (for example YouTube). You can also take photos of your products and share these photos with people who are interested in it.
- Join online groups or mailing lists that are related to the products and services you offer. Connect with these groups and offer information and assistance.
- Avoid aggressive sales tactics on these websites and learn how to read what the customers need to attract them to your brand.
- Understand how social media websites work. These sites are all about connecting and collaboration. Adopt a collaborative, helpful approach, and be an active contributor. These sites generally have rules against aggressive sales tactics.